Devin Moore’s Techdirt Comments

Re: But, there are two kinds of automatic transmissions

My brand new saturn gets 28/35 and it is one of the cheapest cars for its size to get that, all because it has a manual transmission. Everything has its tradeoffs, hardly anything is just objectively and universally better than all other options.

Re: What Cheating is

Furthermore, cheating means you probably can't prove the validity of your answer. What's the corporate response to a screw up where the person who screwed up just copied the answer from someone else? One person tried and failed to get the right answer, and the other one parroted that response without the ability to check it themselves. That sounds like a red flag to me.

What Cheating is

Cheating matters because it means that a person may not be capable of doing the work that they were hired to do. As a result, cheating typically also means that the cheater is taking credit for someone else's work as a result.

This article talks about what cheating is not, but it does a disservice to how collaboration invites cheating and why schools need to go to extra trouble to enforce anti-cheating rules when collaboration is required.

Collaboration to the lazy student means "someone else is going to do the work for me" plus "it will be harder to tell that I didn't do my share of the work". Having been on teams since the 8th grade that functioned this way, I can tell readers matter-of-factly that by college, many students are experts at not contributing to teams. Furthermore, they think it is perfectly normal since no one ever stopped them.

The quote mentions that "thinking skills are the problem", and "In NO industry is collaboration considered cheating", but then it says correctly that "Passing off someone else's work as your own is clearly wrong".

Thinking skills aren't the problem, cheating is the problem. Students will cheat rather than have to reveal their inability to complete their work at the appropriate level of quality. Collaboration provides a method for cheating anytime there is not a VERY proactive attitude towards equal work output from the other team members.

If not turned in by their team members, and without extreme monitoring by teachers, crafty students can pass a team-based class without having done anything -- and more dangerously, without having to prove that they may not be able to do the work at all.

Collaboration is absolutely cheating in any industry, whenever the collaboration is lopsided but the attribution is equal. That situation cheats the majority contributors out of proper credit for their work. Exposing cheating should be the priority of any student on a team for the cheater's own good. Cheating at work can mean fraud or any number of other illegal activities intended to cover up a lack of ability to do the job. To say that this is not a serious thing in the workplace is to condone the worst offenses as long as you have good enough workers to clean up the mess.

Isn't that the entire argument though?

Isn't the RIAA's entire argument on a judgement like that based on that this person must have actually and directly caused a loss of income equal to $1.92 million, i.e. distributing millions of copies of music without permission? If she really could only be proven to have distributed 24 songs each one time, then wouldn't actual damages from the crime amount to the retail losses on those 24 proven distributions?

FBI 'not' investigating?

Nothing about her could be more odd than the FBI publicly stating over the weekend that they are 'not' investigating her on public corruption charges. Now she threatens to sue over defamatory statements? She defamed herself the entire government of Alaska by quitting her term early with no plausible explanation, and now she tries to stop the ocean of criticism with a broom. She should have said she was quitting to take care of her new kid (whether that was true or not) -- no one would be able to make any comments on that.

Necessary evil

Granted, this may be a special case, but patents are meant to protect the ideas vs. implementations for a very good reason. Without such a protection, an individual's idea could be implemented by a company with no implied license on the idea itself, meaning companies could steal ideas left and right. In the case where someone 'just so happens' to have patented the same idea, that's a risk that companies should hedge against by researching patents BEFORE they go to market with an implementation. It's easy for Apple to come back now and say this is garbage, but wouldn't they say that even if they really had stolen this guy's idea? That's why patents exist, Ford had to pay an engine patent in the beginning and Apple should pay this patent if it is a legitimate claim. They will still make money and the true inventor will get reimbursed for their original innovation.

Fair use and transformative works

The article assumes that copyright somehow has a universal application, which it does not. Almost all of those examples are fair use or transformative works, and even under current supposedly "strict" copyright laws, they would be easily defeated and the accused would go free.

8-bar sample vs. melody copy

There is an 8-bar "gimme" rule in music where if you want to sample (i.e. exact audio copy) a song, you can usually get away with it, with a wink and a nod to the originator. Unfortunately, if the melody and lead are the same in a "new" song, giving the impression that it is not meant as a sample, and that becomes a platinum hit... for future reference, you better make sure the original author is dead before you try that.

mp3's used in studio

The reason this is happening: more artists are producing songs and listening to the mp3's themselves, and optimizing their music for mp3 playback. If the artist can make it sound good on grooves on a record/mp3/cd/etc, then more people will be able to enjoy that medium, regardless of whether the absolute quality of the medium is better. And for the record, fresh vinyl on a big system is incredible, but high-def cd's are definitely a close second.

Hook

So what you're saying is that I should be able to borrow the hook from any song for free. So I should be able to just take "She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah" and put it into a song without paying anyone anything? Can I just take some Jimi Hendrix solos and add them for free into my songs? That sure would make it sound like I knew how to write great hooks, if I could "borrow" others' hooks for free and profit from that.

Just take out a loan

Even better, just incorporate and take out a business loan in the name of the band company. That way, you pay back the minimum for such an investment and then, assuming the band is profitable, the rest is yours. You could crank out one-hit wonders with this structure and even at a minimum return if you can chart a single top 10 hit, you'd easily repay the loan and make 100% profit from then on out on royalties.

legality filter

What's wrong with delaying public display of videos until they are reviewed for legality? I don't see why all videos have to get posted, then only later when enough people are outraged does google have to take it down. It seems they bear some responsibility for making visible the illegal activities without checking first to see if there were any illegal activities in the video. Google could have forwarded the video to the proper authorities without ever making it public, which would have cut off the perpetrators from their sick search for infamy.

digital vs. analog copyright

getting rid of copyright doesn't have much effect on the value of the original... except in the case of digital works. There is only one real Statue of David by Michelangelo, but there are millions of "Enter Sandman" copies by "Metallica", even though there's only one gold master, they are all nearly identical in content to that gold master, to the extent that you can enjoy any copy of the performance as if the band were right there in front of you. The difference? They still aren't right there in front of you, and not capitalizing on that fact is their own fault. Movies can be put on real time, but generally that's called theater, and it has major drawbacks compared to an actual movie. If movie theaters are so concerned about copyright, then stop selling any DVD's and charge more for tickets to see the movie.

Content and advertising are different

The problem is, content and advertising are actually different. I pay for content from my cable provider, and I expect advertisements to come in a block separate from the content, yielding some reduction in the amount of content but nonetheless leaving me with "uninterrupted" blocks of content. To put product placements within the content is to essentially to increase advertisement time, and thus give me less content for my money.

boredom is mother of invention

Boring lectures will always cause kids to tune out. I drew pictures so much in my lectures that I switched to majoring in art, because I figured as long as I'm going to be drawing the whole time, I may as well get credit for it!

Re: WebMD

Furthermore, can you perform brain surgery because you read about it in a physical Encyclopedia at the library? I wouldn't even trust a brain surgery student to my brain. I would want the most experienced expert at it. Would you want Lance Armstrong as a bike teacher? I dunno, is he any good at teaching it, or can he only ride extremely well by nature? None of these things is connected to the other as the premise implies.